NVIDIA and IBM Bring Supercomputing to Big Data Analytics

NVIDIA and IBM are working to tackle some of the most vexing challenges of data center computing.

Last Friday, IBM announced that it’s developing a GPU-accelerated version of its DB2 database software with BLU Acceleration – the database used around the world by enterprise customers handling high-volume workloads.

And, IBM plans to accelerate its other big data software packages in the future.

IBM is also optimizing Power versions of popular GPU-accelerated applications for bioinformatics, defense, finance, molecular dynamics, and weather modeling , including SOAP3, NAMD, GROMACS, FFTW library, and Quantum Espresso.

And, they’ll all take advantage of the availability of the world’s first GPU-accelerated OpenPower systems.

The new system is the first result of an ongoing effort with IBM to couple the best of our technologies around processors, data center systems, accelerators, system software, and applications to deliver optimized solutions that solve extremely complex problems.

Future POWER systems will integrate NVIDIA NVLink, the world’s first high-speed GPU interconnect. This will eliminate the need to transfer data between the CPU and GPUs over the PCI Express interface.

NVLink lets GPUs and IBM POWER CPUs share data five to 12 times faster than they can today.

This will improve performance for many enterprise and high performance computing applications, and help bring us a step closer to reaching exascale computing levels.

Expect to see news of more computing system architecture advances from NVIDIA, IBM, and OpenPOWER foundation members in the coming months.

Since NVLink isn’t available until 2016 and the S812L/S822L also support both CAPI and PCIe3x16 (just like the S824L), what are the GPU-related benefits of the S824L with factory-included Tesla over a system of S812L/S822L with after-market Tesla?

An NVidia-included model with nearly identity specs on the IBM hardware costs far, far more than the sum of said IBM hardware and NVidia’s most expense after-market GPU, so it seems I’m missing (and so is the marketing material) some crucial synergy in the S824L that doesn’t otherwise exist…